VCR finally dead

The videocassette recorder that revolutionised home entertainment by allowing television audiences to capture their favourite shows on tape and watch them at their leisure will die at the end of the month after a decade-long battle with obsolescence. It is roughly 60 years old.

Known to every child of the ’80s and ’90s as the VCR, the machine became a fixture under the television sets in households as a means for watching movies with terrible resolution, forcing the viewing of grainy family milestones, and recording your grandmother’s daytime melodramas.

The VCR’s demise may come as a shock, mostly because many thought it was already dead.

But Japan-based Funai Electronic Company has continued to manufacture the machines even as several generations of superior entertainment technology have come to market. Now, executives say that a lack of demand and difficulty acquiring parts has convinced them to cease production at the end of July.

I’m trying to think when I got rid of my VCR. It was in fact only a few years ago as I had some old family videos I wanted to keep it for. But then I realised I could digitise them and save storage space.

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Comments (14)

They were bit like the Labour Party good in their day but passed there used by date with modern technology what it is today.Like most things of this era you have wiz kids turning out technology that just gets better and cheaper so most cases afford it

Southern Raider

I remember the parents buying a Beta recorder which was much better technology than VHS except it didn’t get licenced to other manufacturers. At the start it wasn’t a problem as video shops had copies of both, but as time went on the Beta shelves got less and less until one day you could rent any at all

Huevon

rightoverlabour

Irony is vcr tapes are less likely to become unusable with time. Unless you store stuff in the cloud the chances are the dvds will eventually become unreadable and hard drives have a life of about 7 years. If part of the tape gets damaged you splice it out. If part of a dvd or drive gets damaged you throw it all away. I still keep all the original vcr homevideos even if copied to dvd

Inandout

Moisture is the enemy of VHS tapes, but if kept in ideal storage and were decent quality, may last for over 50 years. Those early TV series that were recorded on film (eg kinescope) survive but many video taped don’t. I didn’t realise that only 2 of the original 22 episodes of ‘The Avengers’ tapes survived.

Records sound better, so it’s not just retro. By comparison, VCR tapes aren’t better. It’s like tape players, CD players, and MP3 players in cars. Nobody is going to miss the CD player, as it’s no better than the MP3 player, but I’d happily get a tape player back in my car, as it sounded better (if you’re in to a non-synthetic sound and the experience of just creating your own compi tape).

Sometimes I harken back to my youth…at which point, my daughter usually just says, ‘Daddy, can we play that song again?’

Harriet

Inandout

I have kept our VCR is good condition because now and again a family member will ask that camcorder family movies transferred to VHS, be digitised. A good DVD recorder will actually improve on the original footage by smoothing it out.

backster

I was trying to tell an elderly aunt just yesterday that once her VCR bites the dust, that it would be very difficult to buy another one. She couldn’t understand why this was and that, ‘they always change things to make you buy something else’. She still has a large collection of recorded tapes and wants to be able to play them.

Moisture is the enemy of VHS tapes, but if kept in ideal storage and were decent quality, may last for over 50 years. Those early TV series that were recorded on film (eg kinescope) survive but many video taped don’t. I didn’t realise that only 2 of the original 22 episodes of ‘The Avengers’ tapes survived.

That goes for studio master tapes as well. These days when artists are going back to the original multi-tracks recorded in the 1960s and 1970s to do a ‘remastered’ version of their albums, the tapes often have to be ‘baked’ in a kind of oven before they can be used.

But yes, VHS was better quality for storing audio than an audio tape. Back in the 1970s or 1980s a group was archiving the Beach Boys music, and one of them copied all the tapes onto good-quality VHS. The resultant copies ended up as the Sea Of Tunes bootlegs which are very good quality.